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The ‘Bill’ Animations

When I was in high school, I was often bored. And when I was bored, I often played around with programs on my Texas Instruments TI-82 graphing calculator. Most of the stuff I wrote for the calculator has been lost to history . . . I still have the calculator itself, but its memory has been wiped countless times since the late ’90s, and I didn’t have any mechanism for backing it up.

Well, while I was looking for something completely unrelated in the dark recesses of my hard drive, I stumbled upon some text files with TI-basic source code. Apparently, at some point, I manually transcribed some code over to my PC . . . specifically, the code for two short animations starring an unfortunate stick figure named Bill and his demented, unnamed companion.

Because I’m a nerd, I was able to get these programs/animations into a usable TI-82 format (via a Windows 98 virtual machine and the ancient TI GraphLink software) . . . and then it was quick and easy to transfer them to the TI operating system in an emulator (WabbitEmu) and run them. There were a couple transcription errors, but, after fixing them, they ran perfectly.

So, yeah . . . here are two short animations that I put together on a TI-82 calculator when I was bored in high school. . . .

Bill 1:

Bill 2:

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.